Monthly Archives: October 2014

This is an interactive paper session designed to encourage discussion and dialogue around how citizenship and dissent plays out in and between a diverse array of material and mediated spaces: from traditional public squares, to social media platforms, to commercial centers or workplaces.

Potential issues may include:

Occupy/ Culture Jamming

Ferguson/ Policing/ Riots

Squatting

Surveillance

E-Graffiti/Hacktivism

Social Movements

Border Militia

Session will be sponsored by the Cultural Geography and Communications Geography specialty groups.

Energy forms a crucial support system for the everyday reproduction of urban life in all its forms (Gandy 2005; Swyngedouw 2006). The planetary scale infrastructures that produce and distribute energy for towns and cities are actively being reconfigured across various geographies in response to a range of ongoing global-local pressures, processes and imperatives (Swyngedouw 1997) including climate change and low carbon agendas (Bulkeley & Newell 2010; Hodson & Marvin 2010), securitization (Graham 2010), financial crisis and ongoing forms of political contestation (McFarlane & Rutherford 2008). Such material transformations are shaping new geographies both within and beyond urban regions (Graham & Marvin 2001) that suggest new considerations about politics, inequality and everyday life across energy infrastructures.

This session is interested in the everyday geographies of planetary (urban) infrastructures of energy relating to extraction, distribution, supply and consumption. Such geographies suggest the need to pay close attention to the ways in which these global, urban infrastructures of energy are shifted and intervened across by various social interests (Hughes 1983). This call for papers seeks contributions from scholars interested in these everyday transformations of energy infrastructures from a micro scale setting of the household through to the vast pipelines that transport oil across politicized landscapes. We invite papers focused both on the global North and South, or sensitive comparative analyses (Ward 2008; Robinson 2011), including topics such as:

The daily operations of planetary scale infrastructures

Geographies of informality and incrementalism

The struggles around energy poverty, precarity, and security

The politics of knowledge and energy technology in everyday settings

Contestations and resistances across various forms of energy infrastructure

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words by email to both anthonylevenda@pdx.edu and j.d.silver@durham.ac.uk by November 3rd. Notifications of inclusion in the session will be made by November 5th.

Urbanization on the Chinese Frontier: The Political Stakes of “Progress”

AAG CFP: Chicago 2015
In China’s national minority populated frontier regions, development in general, and urbanization in particular, is often viewed through one of two lenses: positively, as a process that allows for material and social development that contributes to increasing living standards and opportunities; or cynically, as a calculated state strategy to weaken ethno-national identities, spread contemporary Han culture to minority regions, and lock minorities into an urban world that structurally disadvantages them. Paradoxically, the city potentially could allow for any and all of these possibilities.

Because the city invokes such a complex web of factors potentially positive and negative, it is apt to ask what is at stake in frontier urbanization: On whose terms is urbanization enacted? What does it mean to benefit from urbanization? Will urbanization really bring the homogenization both desired and feared by different stakeholders?

This paper panel seeks to analyze these questions and their greater social, political, and geo-political repercussions in China’s urbanizing border regions.

I am hoping to draw together perspectives based around different theoretical and methodological approaches, for instance but not limited to:
· Cross-ethnic research
· Studies on migrants
· Ethnographic research
· Demographic analysis
· Discourse analysis
· Household or workplace surveys
· Theoretical problems of studying the Chinese city
· Theory concerning minority affairs and classification

Please send paper abstracts to Andrew Grant at angrant@ucla.edu through October 31st.

Articulating discourse analysis in geography: method, practice and processOrganizers: Chad Steacy, Dept. of Geography, University of GeorgiaChristian Pettersen, Dept. of Geography, University of Georgia

Discourse analysis has achieved mainstream acceptance in geographic research (Waitt 2010). Over the past two decades, it has proved itself a powerful and versatile research tool, informing a diverse body of study, from Tim Cresswell’s (1992) early reevaluation of urban graffiti narratives to Steven Pile’s (2005) psychoanalytically-informed exhibition of urban fantasy ‘dream-work’. Beyond a mere variety of subject matter, discourse analysis has additionally informed work spanning wide theoretical breadth, from realist-oriented ideology critique (i.e. Linnros & Hallin 2001) to the radical (de)constructionism of post-structural genealogy (as performed by Cooke & Jenkins 2001).

But despite its popularity and adaptability, discourse analysis is too often left underexplored, under-theorized as method and under-elaborated as practice (Antaki, C. et al. 2003; Lees 2004). It is quite common for articles using discourse analysis as their primary methodology to leave their ‘findings’ to speak for themselves, as though the mechanics of analysis and the theoretical challenges that arise are extraneous to – or in any case implicitly expressed within – the research results.

This session endeavors to open the ‘black box’ and articulate discourse analysis by way of case-study or through direct theoretical consideration of discourse analysis as method, practice, and/or process. Distinctively qualitative perspectives are preferred.

Please send statements of interest or titles and abstracts to Chad Steacy at steacy@uga.edu and/or Christian Pettersen at cpetters@uga.edu by November 1.

This is an interactive paper session designed to encourage discussion and dialogue around how citizenship and dissent plays out in and between a diverse array of material and mediated spaces: from traditional public squares, to social media platforms, to commercial centers or workplaces.

Potential issues may include:

Occupy/ Culture Jamming

Ferguson/ Policing/ Riots

Squatting

Surveillance

E-Graffiti/Hacktivism

Social Movements

Border Militia

Session will be sponsored by the Cultural Geography and Communications Geography specialty groups.

If interested, please contact Bruce D’Arcus (darcusb@miamioh.edu) by October 24 (though obviously, the sooner the better!).

We are seeking papers for several sessions that examine geographies of media, including (but not limited to) film, television, music, art, advertising, the Internet, social media, newspapers and magazines, radio, video and animation etc. These sessions should include contributions to current issues surrounding these media, whether theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, etc.

We hope to present a wide range of both topics and contexts, and we seek participants interested in the geographical implications—social, political, cultural, and economic—that are often contained within the spaces and places of different forms of media. Importantly, media often extend beyond their original form, so papers that also envision these media geographies as part of a broader industrial, cultural, and political complex are welcomed, as are papers that consider the broad linkages between media and our daily lived experiences, from our cities to streets to living rooms to imaginations. These contexts invite inquiries into the production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption of all types of media, and we encourage critical, theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and discursive contributions. We also welcome inquiries from anyone wishing to assemble a special themed session or act as a discussant in a session.

Priority deadline is October 29, 2013 (Wednesday). Final deadline is November 5, 2013 (Wednesday).
1. Compose an abstract following the AAG guidelines.
2. Register online with the AAG to obtain a PIN.
3. Email Presenter Identification Number (PIN) and abstract to Johnny Finn (john.finn@cnu.edu)

For further information please contact:
Johnny Finn, Christopher Newport University (john.finn@cnu.edu)
Joseph Palis, North Carolina State University (jepalis@ncsu.edu)
Laura Sharp, University of Arizona (laurasharp@email.arizona.edu)

Organizers:
Martin Danyluk, University of Toronto
Kyle Loewen, University of British Columbia

Since the mid-twentieth century, the rise of logistics has played an important but underappreciated role in reconfiguring global socio-spatial relations. Emerging from military and imperialist origins, logistical developments like the intermodal shipping container, just-in-time production, and supply-chain management have been vital to both globalizing production and reorganizing forms of power. After being confined to business and management schools for several decades, logistics has only recently been taken up as an object of critical study (Bernes 2013; Bonacich and Wilson 2008; Cowen 2014; Hall and Hesse 2012; Hesse and Rodrigue 2004; Neilson 2012; Sekula 2002). Yet despite a growing body of research into the spatialities of global logistical systems, there is a need for further geographical reflection on the modes and structures of power at work within them.

This session therefore seeks to build wide-ranging critical conversations around the entanglements of logistics and power. For example, firms’ and states’ efforts to make commodity flows more efficient, flexible, and reliable are part of violent and contested processes rather than seamless, purely technical, or inherently beneficial operations. Cheap goods movement depends on increased worker exploitation and acts of dispossession throughout planetary distribution networks. In another sense, supply systems shape economic and political possibilities through the distribution of material resources and wastes, enabling certain ways of life while hindering others. Lastly, by organizing infrastructures of supply, logistics affects processes of social reproduction, with gendered implications for consumption and labor practices.

Yet while global supply chains create new mechanisms of exploitation and control, they also present new opportunities for political resistance and struggle (Herod 2000; Reifer 2004; Tsing 2009). In this spirit, we invite papers from a range of disciplinary, methodological, and conceptual orientations—including feminist, Marxist, queer, de-colonial, assemblage, and anti-racist theory—that foreground the power-laden geographies of logistics. Examples include but are encouraged to exceed:

uneven geographies of race and commodity flow

politics within the supply chain

labor and the logistics revolution

logistics, urbanization, and infrastructure

the entanglement of war and trade

logistics, imperialism, and territory

gendered dynamics of logistics and social reproduction

logistics and biopolitics

ways of being and becoming that are made possible and foreclosed through supply infrastructure

enclosure and dispossession within logistical systems

Please e-mail abstracts of up to 250 words to Martin Danyluk (martin.danyluk@utoronto.ca) and Kyle Loewen (kyle.loewen@geog.ubc.ca) by Friday, October 17, 2014. Be sure to include a title and contact information.References

Herod, Andrew. 2000. “Implications of Just-in-Time Production for Union Strategy: Lessons from the 1998 General Motors-United Auto Workers Dispute.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (3): 521–47.

Non-profits, Governance, and the Welfare State in the Post-Economic Crisis Period

The welfare state in the United States has been marked by a set of transitions in the last 30 years. This includes, most notably: the decline in cash assistance to the poor; the rescaling of the governance of the welfare state down to state and local levels; and the contracting out of basic public sector goods and services to private (for-profit and not-for-profit) corporations. These processes are both well-established in practice, and well understood in geography and the social sciences more generally. And there is some convergence towards the American framework of welfare state governance in other parts of the north Atlantic (most notably Canada and the United Kingdom).

Importantly, it was this welfare state that had to confront the economic crisis of 2007-2009 and that crisis’s very long shadow. And it is this welfare state that we have for the foreseeable future. As we continue to make sense of the crisis, and what it has wrought, it is important that we understand the ways in which the welfare state is able, or not able, to withstand such crises and how we should interpret the character of the welfare state moving forward. In this session we will be addressing the governance and performance of the welfare state in the economic crisis and in the period since the worst of the crisis ended.

Papers in this session can address any number of issues related to this theme (and can be about the US or any other country) including:

The role of non-profits in the post-crisis welfare state

The fiscal crisis of states and municipalities and its aftermath

The capacity of non-profits to withstand the crisis

The continued privatization of the welfare state

The changing character of American federalism in the contemporary political economy

The implications of the current character of the welfare state for our understandings of state theory

The spatial variability in the character and capacity of the welfare state

The Big Society and the evolving inter-relationships between the state and non-profits in the UK

This session is being organized by James DeFilippis, Rutgers University (jdefilip@rci.rutgers.edu); Phil Ashton, University of Illinois-Chicago (pashton@uic.edu); and Emily Rosenman, University of British Columbia (emily.rosenman@geog.ubc.ca). If you are interested in participating in the session, or if you have any questions, please email James by October 30.

Methods in Legal GeographyOrganizers: Margo Kleinfeld, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; Sarah A. Moore, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Legal geography has emerged as a significant subfield in the last two decades. While much rich empirical work has been conducted, we follow Irus Braverman’s (2014) call to more explicitly engage questions of methodology and methods by soliciting papers that discuss these topics in any substantive field within legal geography.

Topics may include:

How do legal geographers define and collect data? How do these compare to other approaches common in geography (spatial analysis and visualization, ethnography, archival research, etc.)

What are the most compelling modes of analysis for understanding how the law works through and creates space?

What other disciplines do legal scholars draw on for methods? How do legal geographers implement methods from other subfields?

How can we compare such phenomena as “jurisdiction” and “territory” across locales and at different times?

Political ecologists and resource geographers have well-theorized the profound ways in which social movements shape resource governance by advancing the claims of marginalized resource users to lands, forests, and fisheries that they have been denied access to as a result of unequal political-economic forces, such as historical land inequality and exclusion (Wolford 2010), rapid land use changes (Rocheleau and Ross 1995), and large-scale extractive investments (Perreault 2006, Himley 2013). Not only do such movements improve access of small-scale and marginalized peasants, forest dwellers, and pastoralists to land and resources, they also expand spaces of democratic resource governance to include the voices of everyday resource users and civil society (Bebbington et al. 2008). This rich body of work, while expanding understandings of how movements improve resource access and governance processes, has largely focused on contexts and cases in which popular movements—despite the significant political obstacles they face—can and do occur in open, direct, and confrontational ways.

In this session, we seek to answer how and why resistance emerges and operates in situations ‘where there is no movement’ (Malseed 2008), where social movements, and forms of open and confrontational protest, are highly repressed. In such authoritarian resource regimes, where resources are governed undemocratically, involving little participation by small-scale resource users and civil society, how can resistance emerge and make successful claims to land and resources, affecting development and governance outcomes, chipping away at divisions of access and power? Furthermore, how and why are some resistance efforts more effective than others, leading to unequal development outcomes? We seek to move beyond the literature on everyday resistance (Scott 1986) and ‘avoidance protest’ (Adas 1986) to examine how dissent of the repressed navigates the power-laden boundaries between covert and overt resistance (Walker 2008), seeking to make resource claims heard and generate social change without upsetting pre-existing structures of power in ways that invoke further political repression. We seek to understand how spaces of resistance are forged and expanded in places where they did not previously exist.

To address these issues we invite theoretically innovative and empirically driven papers examining emergent resistance in relation to all relevant themes or topics across a wide set of authoritarian or undemocratic resource governance contexts globally. Key themes include, but are not limited to:

Navigating borders between authoritarianism and democracy, protest and repression in repressive and ostensibly democratic resource regimes

The role of authoritarian legacies and memories of repression in shaping contemporary forms of resistance, dissent and refusal in democratic contexts

How movements and governments negotiate boundaries between popular demand, protest, and repression

The interactions and engagements of locally-based, underground resistance groups with broader, transnational agrarian social movements and agendas

Relationships between resource materiality and emergent forms of resistance

Resisting unequal access to a diverse set of resources and environmental goods such as urban residential land, public spaces and commons, transportation and communication infrastructure, agricultural lands, forests, rangelands, fisheries, minerals, and carbon.

If interested in participating please send a 250 word abstract to Miles Kenney-Lazar (mkenneylazar@clarku.edu) by Wednesday, October 15, 2014. Participation in the session will be confirmed by Wednesday, October 22.

Note: We expect to have a discussant for this session and therefore presenters will be asked to submit a written paper a few weeks before the conference.

References

Adas, M. 1986. From Footdragging to Flight: The Evasive History of Peasant Avoidance Protest in South and South‐East Asia. Journal of Peasant Studies, 13(2), 64–86.